Launching a SaaS Business and Content Marketing Trends post-COVID-19 [with Xenia Muntean]

Today’s episode brings Xenia Muntean to The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Xenia is the Founder of Planable, a content review and marketing collaboration platform used by over 5,000 teams at brands like Jaguar, Land Rover, Viber, Siemens, and United Nations.

 

Xenia and Andrei will be discussing Content Marketing Trends after COVID-19, as well as how to launch a SaaS Business, bringing her recent experience to the table.

 

Xenia was recognised on Forbes 30U30, spoke at Cannes Lions, and has been a guest on Growth Marketing Today, Social Geek, Social Minds and many other podcasts. She has also published a book – The Manifesto on Content Marketing Teams, and has recently launched her own podcast – People of Marketing.

 

For the past four years, she has worked with hundreds of marketing teams, helping them collaborate efficiently from across the room or across the globe. With thousands of marketers suddenly working from home, Xenia will share some powerful insights about remote marketing teamwork.

 

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Connect with Xenia:

Planable: https://planable.io/

Follow Planable: https://www.linkedin.com/company/planable/

Connect with Xenia: https://www.linkedin.com/in/xeniamuntean/

People of Marketing podcast: http://bit.ly/PeopleOfMarketing

 

Connect with Andrei:

Marketiu: https://marketiu.com / https://marketiu.ro 

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/

Marketiu on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu

Marketiu on Twitter: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency

Marketiu on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/

Email at hello@marketiu.ro

Episode Transcript:

Andrei

Hello, everybody! This is Andrei and you are on The Marketing Innovation Show! Today's guest is Xenia Muntean, Forbes 30U30 and the Founder of Planable, a content review and marketing collaboration platform used by over 5000 teams and brands like Jaguar, Land Rover, Viber, Siemens and United Nations. Well done, Xenia! Today we're going to have an insightful and exciting conversation about Social Media Marketing and Content Trends, and how technology can help brands better use online channels to grow communities collaboratively. Xenia, thank you so much for being today with us. How are you? How's life, how's the day been?

 

Xenia

Busy, good busy. Thank you so much for having me on the show. I'm excited to kick off this conversation.

 

Andrei

Awesome, me too. I think maybe a very good place to start for our audience to better understand your journey which is a very exciting one and you entrepreneurship at a very early age, you have a lot of achievements, which I think are worth talking about from an inspirational point of view, but also positioning you in a sort of authority way, so that people know what you're talking about. So tell us, how did everything start? How did you start on this journey and what got you into launching Planable?

 

Xenia  

Yeah. So it all started with me building my first business, which was a Social Media Marketing Agency. I started it during my second year of university and I was actually dreaming of working in the advertising industry since I was a teenager. I was obsessed with everything in the ad world and I started my agency at 21 years old. I was building campaigns for brands, a lot of content for them, managing their social media pages, but also a lot of other digital marketing work, such as branding and web design and so on. I say that it all started with me building my first business because, during that agency time, that's when I discovered the problem that I'm currently solving with Planable. And so for those who are not familiar with how social media marketing happens, every single post for major brands that you see online, every single tweet or every single Instagram post, behind that post, there's a bunch of people that work together on that post to plan it, to collaborate, make sure that it's on-brand, to make sure that the tone of voice is correct. Make sure they're using the proper hashtags and proper jargon about their product or about their service. So there's a lot of planning that goes into one single post and there's a lot of cooperation and a lot of workflow. There's even approval systems in place when it comes to an agency working with clients, but also when it comes to larger teams, right? If you have teams that are bigger than two people, there might be some approvals in place where the head of social, for example, might approve content that is built by his team before it goes live. 

 

So how do you manage it all, right? That's the question that I was asking myself when I had my own agency. I was asking myself: what's the proper system, and I ended up actually building the same system as everyone else uses today, without talking to other agencies or with other professionals in the world. That's spreadsheets, it's all running on spreadsheets in the Social Media Marketing World. You have this huge spreadsheet, where you have one row for the text of the post, one row for link that takes you to a file somewhere on Drive or Dropbox, then one row for each thing like, what category does this pose belong, notes and comments, when is it going to launch, what hashtags are you going to use with it and also maybe particularly one specific role for feedback from your teammates or from the client. You can manage it, but it's extremely hard work. And there's a lot of copy-pasting, a lot of room for mistakes and then, at the end, you also need to schedule it in advance and you go to some scheduling tool to do that, to something like Hootsuite or Buffer or TweetDeck, or some other tool. The idea is that this is a very clunky and a very broken process, and the teams are trying to make it work, but it is really hard work.

 

Andrei  

And very time-consuming. So you started with the agency and then you got to know about all these problems, interact with other big companies as well with the agency back then. And, by the way, what year was the scene? What was the year when you started being active on the agency side? Was is before social media technology became available or popular?

 

Xenia  

I remember back then, we were still in that phase where we had to educate clients about social media marketing and the importance of social media and it was a bit of a pioneering in a way of social media marketing. And obviously, tools back then were not necessarily a thing, people were not using. People were using just generic tools, but it's still the case nowadays. It didn't evolve that much as you'd expect it to.

 

Andrei  

Mm hmm. Okay. And then-Planable. Did you do it yourself, were you a bigger team? Now we know how the idea came along. But how did you put it all together? How did you launch it as a product? How do you market it to the right audience? 

 

Xenia  

I started it together with my two co-founders: Vlad and Nick. They both worked in the agency world, so they were familiar with how everything works. And we got together and we realize that this entire process and the entire workflow that happens behind the scenes of content could be simplified and there's a lot of time that could be saved, and we got together and we did just that - we built Planable to solve this problem. We went through pre-accelerator in Cluj, Romania, and during that accelerator, that's when we learned the bulk amount of what it means to lead a start-up, what it means to build one, the product development part. Nick, our CTO, built the product by himself in the early days of Planable. We had about three to four months to build the product, because, at the end of the program, there was a demo day so we had to present it during a conference, actually. So it was a demo day and also at the same time, it was a competition. And if there was an incentive tool to build it fast, which is really hard to build a good product and also build it very fast. So we did in about three to four months and we launched it first in beta, because we knew that. You make the product in three months - it's a very stripped down version of where you're dreaming of building in the future. So we built a minimal version of what Planable is today. And we launched it with a couple of hundred of beta users and we got those users from social media mainly, but also from our own connections, our own network. And beyond that, we also launched on places such as beta page and beta list, which are really great to get very early stage users, early adopters. We got them from forums as well. I remember we were spending quite a lot of time in community and in forums, trying to find potential better users. It was a lot of what today is called growth hacking, trying to figure it out in the beginning and we nurtured that community of beta users for about a year. And then coming out, we were also building the product, developing it. And I think we launched the product and the pricing plans, and we started monetizing the product in a year and a half, after we started building it, and I remember we launched on Product Hunt. It was quite a big splash.

 

Andrei

Okay, so I just got the idea now. It wasn't in the first chart that we wanted to discuss, but I think it's going to be insightful for the guys listening or tuning into today into the episode. So we have the entrepreneurs and then we have the marketing people and the business passionate, these sort of groups of listeners, let's say. So, what I know from the feedback that we got in the past, was some of the people tuning in would be interesting to know- basically, we have the 30 days entrepreneur, the person that wants to launch a tech business and maybe it's the first time that thinking about it or trying to put together the value proposition and the technology and everything themselves or with a small team. What would be something that you found essential understanding or some hacks that you found along the way that you think would be worth mentioning in our discussion that might help them accelerate the learning process being in this pre-launch or launch phase?

 

Xenia  

I think something that I didn't know back then was how to do proper customer development interviews. And I realized in time that they were extremely crucial. We were doing it, based on our intuition, we basically had a few mock-ups. We had them in envision and we were simulating the experience. It was pretty well made, actually now looking backwards, I realize it was not bad at all. We were simulating the experience of the app inside envision servers, you're clicking on something and it was taking you to a different mock-up page. And that was actually pretty cool and it gave people a good experience. So we had the tech part of the customer development interviews, often we had the props, the materials, but the questions, that's probably something that could have been improved quite a lot and there's this great book, called "The mom test" and it's basically - how to do customer development questions, how to ask people the right question so that they give you unbiased replies, or honest replies. Even if you're showing them product that is not yet ready, how do you get the honest replies even if those replies might hurt you? And they might not be the ones you want to hear, but you still need to hear them. Because people want to be nice to you. Right? Who wants to put an entrepreneur down?. No one, no one wants to break their dreams. But you need to find ways to ask those questions so that you actually build something that people love. And we were lucky in a way, because we were our ideal users. So it was hard for us not to spot things that might not be most honest. So it was easier for us to ask questions that are relevant and get the best answers for that. But I think, reading up quite a lot about customer development and what type of questions to ask and how to get people committed to something: what's the problem that you're struggling with? How did you try to solve it, right? If that person you're talking to never tried to solve their problem, might not be a problem at all. How did you try to solve it? And then how did your solution work out? And if you would get a solution that would actually solve your problem, would you pay for it? Because that's another part of it. They might have a real problem, they might need a real solution, but they might not be willing to pay for it. So you need to check all of those boxes, and then you need to get a commitment from them. Well, are you gonna do a trial? Are you gonna give me page of feedback? Are you gonna give me a bullet lists of feedback, something to actually commit them, because then, there's another part of it like: "Yeah, I might be willing to pay." But then, when it actually comes to them committing to something, that's where the real deal happens. And you need to get some kind of commitment as minor as it could be. Even if they pay you like $1, there needs to be some kind of commitment from them. So you know that they're serious about your product, and you're building something with potential.

 

Andrei  

This is nothing not related, but it's a curiosity that might be in other people's minds as well. What were you charging from the beginning? Because you mentioned the beta testers and the beta users. Did you charge companies in the beginning? Or did you go on a freemium model in the beginning, because I know you have a freemium as well now, but how did it work? When did you make the switch and you realize: "Hey, we actually can charge as our competitors do in this space."

 

Xenia  

Funny story. We had a freemium in the beginning, then we took it out. And this summer a few months ago, we did the freemium back, but in a different version. And so I'll tell you a bit more about that why we decided to go back to freemium. In the beginning, we had a freemium model, and everyone in the beta group has free access to everything. And we started monetizing, when we launched it outside of the bet group. And everyone who had the product for free in some form, was grandfathered and some people are still on the free plan, even today. I think that's extremely crucial. The product was not ready, I wouldn't have paid for it, it was very minimal. It was buggy, it was minimal. But it did provide some minimum value. At least when you're in beta, it is important to give the product for free. But at some point, you've got to introduce pricing, because that's the moment of truth for your product.

 

Andrei  

Just another question, but now for the marketing people. How did you think about the launch? Because it was a new product in a market that was still learning about the issues that they would use social media in the right way. And you had to both educate, but also monetize and then you were part of an accelerator, so you had the pressure. How did you think about the launch? I guess you didn't have too much money either to make a global launch or anything like that. How did you think about the right way to launch the product?

 

Xenia  

That’s right. So I'll talk about the real launch, the one that we did on Product Hunt when we launched out of the beta program, because I wouldn't say that when we initially launched in the beta program, I wouldn't say that there was a big launch there. We didn't do that much in terms of the launch. But the real launch when we launched a Product Hunt, and we started monetizing and introduced the pricing plans. We took it very seriously, we prepared so much for that launch. here's a bunch of tips and tricks on how to successfully launch on Product Hunt. There are tons of articles and ebooks on that specific subject. We had a hunter, someone that launched us on Product Hunt, so we asked Murat, who's the CEO of Marvel app. Marvel app is a collaboration tool for designers and we asked him to launch us, to put us on Product Hunt, on that specific day, and we agreed the day, we gave him all the materials so you got to prepare a bunch of designs, a bunch of visuals, copy- what to say about the product itself. And we had an army of friends prepared, standing by waiting. You need a big bump in the beginning so that Product Hunt is like:" Oh, what's this thing everyone votes?". So we have an army of friends, sending an invite just waiting to vote, to support us and tweet about us. It was really great. It went very well, right? In the beginning, we got  100 votes or something, from everyone that we were asking to vote and then naturally snowballed and started going and people genuinely were voting us and asking us questions. So that was the main launch. And then, together with that across the next few months, we also invested in our blog, started doing a bit of SEO Optimisation, we were very content marketing-driven from Day Zero, we knew that this is going to be something, product led growth and we need to market the product in a way that people understand us and in a way that positions us well. One of the struggles even, today is how do we communicate our value in a way that separates us from a class of products that we consider indirect competitors. And that's social media management tools, such as buffer and Hootsuite and Sprout Social and Falcon i o and a bunch of other tools out there that do social media management. And the main challenge was how do we communicate this in a way that people understand that we're not in the same category as them? We do have something to do with social media, but it's not about the publishing side and it's not about the scheduling side, it's not about analytics and managing the channel, it's more about managing content and how do you work as a team on that content? That's a struggle even today, because marketers are very familiar with the social media management list of tools that, when you say social media, they go: "Oh, Hootsuite, Buffer and so on". It's a new thing and, at the same time, because, the entire category of collaboration, for content, for social, it's pretty new and there's an explanation of why this entire category of tools is new. But it's challenging to make people understand it.

 

Andrei  

Okay, as a quick summary, from our previous conversation, and for everybody to be clear on what Planable does and why is different from the other sources? Actually, it helps teams manage the content and the decision around pushing certain types of content on certain types of platforms, right? And what post has to go where and then enables the whole marketing team or management team to collaborate on producing that end post on a specific platform, right? 

 

Xenia  

Yeah. 

 

Andrei

Super. Okay, so now we get into the content side of things. And I think it's a good time to look at what we initially wanted to discuss before this long parentheses, which were changes that we saw over the last couple of months, and then what you feel the word is going to look tomorrow when it comes to content and social media, sharing and everything else to do with this area. So looking back on the last, let's say, six months, ever since COVID came and more brands started to go digital, started to pay more attention to their online communities. Do you feel there has been any change or anything shifted when it comes to social media and content?

 

Xenia  

So there are three points of change top of mind that I saw. The first one is just the acceleration of content production. I feel like it exploded. The entire content marketing industry is in the future. Basically, it's where we expected it to be in a couple of years. Just the amount of content brands are producing nowadays has doubled probably compared with pre-pandemic days. And that makes sense, because you can't do ads. People don't want to be sold, too and so many ads budgets have been cut. Content is providing value, providing entertainment, providing meaningful information to your audience is the best way to go during this time. So it does make a lot of sense. The first thing that I noticed is the colouration of content. And then the second thing is the production of content in a more low key way in a more authentic way, right? Brands have ditched the studios because no one goes in a studio with a team. that's not really possible, right? You got to improvise it, you've got to do it in a startup way. You better shoot videos and produce content in whatever your way you can. Do I like do content over zoom and stuff like that, not 4k, not fancy. And I think that's actually an interesting direction the content took, in a very well fits with the trends that we've seen in the past years, and what consumers might want during this time- more humane approach to marketing, a more relatable one. And I think that works together well what I mentioned before- the people don't want to be sold to during this period of time, and seeing content that is authentic and relatable and recognizable, it does have this more empathetic nature. And then the first change that I mentioned and that I noticed, is related to the empathy factor about brands trying to build more of a personality or more values in their core marketing. And by that, I mean that brands that already had a soul, had values and had personality and had empathy for their audience, a social side to it, they’re accentuating it more and more, they're highlighting it more and more than other brands that didn't have a rushing to create it, and we're trying to slowly build it now, at least. So kind of highlighting that the values, the care about communities or whatever values that fit well within this current environment, either highlighting them or trying to build them now, though, it's really hard to build them because, the audience is going to notice that you didn't have that specific value, not talking about that much and suddenly it's all about that. You need to slowly build it, and it needs to be authentic, and it needs to make sense with your brand. Those are the main three changes that I, I've seen in the content world recently.

 

Andrei  

And if you were to look at tomorrow and see how these trends really will survive, or what are the changes could we expect to see over the next couple of months because hopefully, the pandemic it's not gonna last forever and again, we don't have some financial difficulties for a couple more months, but there's a future there. So how do you feel the social media world is gonna be transforming next? What's good quality content today? How should brands look at producing good quality content if they just started out now or if they just started to focus on it now?

 

Xenia  

Yeah, that's a good question. I think there's no right answer to this question. Like what is good content, good content is the one that works for your brand, that brings results, good content that is aligned with your brand that is genuine. And I think the only way to achieve that is if you have diversity in your marketing team. Because there's so many times brands publish something or launch a campaign and you can see that not too many people have looked at it because it's tone-deaf, it's not relatable, it doesn't match with the current reality. That's only possible if not enough people have taken a look at it, if it was written by a copywriter and no one else, checked it, because I can hardly imagine that if a team of 10 look at ads, no one raises a red flag about specific campaigns we've seen. No, I don't want to point fingers but I think that's the only way- if you bring your team together, and you have to have a diversity of views on culture, on the social part of the world, and politics and everything, if there's a diversity of points, and if there's more people involved and there's this open cooperation inside a marketing team, and if more departments are also involved, that's something I championed quite a lot on. Social media is not just about the marketing team, it is about the entire brand, it is about the entire company. And whenever you have the chance, if you're doing a product launch, you've got to have your product team involved. If you're doing employer branding on social media, you've got to have your HR team involved, and so on and so on. So the more people you can bring on, and the more diversity you can create your, you're going to get better and brighter ideas, which eventually is going to lead to better quality of content. I've seen brands, I've seen clients that use videos which perform well on social media, and could work, but it really does depend on your brand, maybe static, maybe photos is one of the works even better to you. In the end, the format is just the vessel. It's not necessarily what makes a piece of content a good content, its brand alignment if that specific content resonates with your brand, it could make sense for your brand. If it's really built in a collaborative way, which is probably going to lead to a better idea, and also if it's meaningful for your audience, if it's something that actually brings on more value, because that's what content should be. Content should always be something of value for the audience. Otherwise, it's probably an ad.

 

Andrei  

Got it! Okay, and another thing that was on my mind, and we had a lot of discussions with clients as well, which tended to be a bit concerned and I was curious to see how you got this vibe from maybe your clients or from the industry from software provider point of view- in terms of the organic side of things. So we have the content and we publish it to bring value to the community and, there are brands with big communities out there. However, there seems to be a feeling in the market, even brands being afraid of the fact that the organic algorithms have started to decrease a bit in terms of efficiently and reach and then getting worried about the fact that maybe their content doesn't get as far as it could go. What's your feeling there, maybe if you have any tips for companies with this worry to amplify the results that they get from their organic content, apart from it being good quality in terms of aligning with the brand and everything that we discussed now which by the way are very good points. And I totally agree with you on all of them.

 

Xenia  

Yeah, glad to hear it. Well, in terms of what works on social media, and what tips and tricks as you mentioned... different platforms encourage different format, obviously Facebook encourages video, other platforms might like different formats of content, looking at the time your audience is most engaged, that's something else again. But in the end, yes, the algorithms have changed in a major, major way. And if you're not the type of brand that is building content that is super engaging super, has some kind of virality, it has some shareable factor to it, then yes, it is, pay to play in the end. You either got a sponsor the content and build that around that specific content, or you've got to switch to strategy and invest in maybe less content, but more meaningful and more shareable potential, I'd say. So that's the only way you can make it work. But yes, organic is not the same as it was.

 

Andrei  

Okay, cool. So then I think we covered a lot of points. Actually, I think that everybody tuning in has at least only one thing to get away from this or three or five, but let's try to sum them. So we talked about so many things today. And from the entrepreneurship part and point of view, from the social media and content side of things. Now, a very tough thing that we'll have to do and we usually do it in every episode is, we try to summarize everything in three maybe four points, that the audience can take away and they can try to apply straight away into their business or their strategy, because in the end, information is only information until it is applied to standardable results. So, for somebody that is maybe working in marketing, looking at reevaluating their content marketing or social media strategy, or even the tools that they use for planning content and organizing content, what would be the main takeaways from our discussion that you feel they would be able to apply to their business?

 

Xenia  

I think thoroughly researching and knowing your audiences is definitely the first thing and that takes me back to the customer development interviews that we discussed, right? That was about knowing our audience, as well. Doing a lot of research and doing survey and talking to your customers, to your audience, and really understanding your audience is probably the first takeaway I would take from this conversation. And the second would probably be -  know yourself as a brand. It's all about knowledge. Knowing yourself and being self-aware as a brand, what do you stand for a figuring that as early as you can. Because you build your brand and if you do not have a set of values for your brand, when you try to implement those, it's going to be hard and it's not going to be authentic. Figuring out who you are from day one as a brand, and doing some introspection in yourself as a company and figuring out your values and what you stand for, what's your flag that you stand by? That's the second takeaway. I guess the third one would be to pick your strategy. Especially for social media, there's two paths. If you want to go the path where we're going to create a lot of content and we're going to invest in it or we're going to create less content and we're going to go the organic route, and we're going to invest a lot in one specific piece of content. Are you going to put all your eggs in one basket or diversify? That's your strategy that you got to pick. If you're in the middle, that's probably the worst. You either create a lot of goals and you sponsor them and you create a lot of word of mouth and a lot of vibe, or you create one and invest in the quality of that content. Picking your strategies is probably the third takeaway.

 

Andrei  

Thanks so much. That was awesome. So tell us more about Planable. There's a lot of cool stuff that you do. And I think that you're helping your customers a lot. Obviously you work with some big names, but I guess smaller ones, as well. So tell us what's in the pipeline? What are you guys planning to do next? What do customers appreciate more about your platform that maybe some of our listeners would find the value in as well?

 

Xenia 

Yeah. So look, the fourth trend that I didn't mention that happened across the past six months, was just the amount of digitalization and building up the tech stack of things that happen in the meanwhile. Because everyone else is working remote and everyone is working from home and trying to make it work. Teams have consistently built up their tech stack from what they had before. And us, being a tool for collaboration, we're very well-positioned for this remote life. That's the way we're currently helping most of our customers by just trying to bring everyone else in the same room as they were before, but digitally, and in a way that they don't feel they're working from different places on earth, but that they're really working from across the whole as they were working before. And if anyone is interested to learn more about Planable, the website is Planable.io. So check us out, we're more than willing to talk to you and see if there's anything we can do to help you with remote work, we certainly helped hundreds of teams in the past half a year. Yeah, that's kind of what we do at Planable. 

 

Andrei

Tell us a bit more about your Podcast!

 

Xenia

Yeah, of course! It’s called People of Marketing and every Wednesday we launch an episode where we interview an inspiring marketer. someone interesting and someone that had a very aspirational journey in his career. CMOS, heads of social, digital marketers with years and years of experience. We basically get an insight into their lives. Tune in, we are on every major podcast app. Check us out! 

 

Andrei

We’ll leave the details of your podcast in the description below, also with the contact info in case anyone wants to get in touch directly to ask about the platform, your podcast or anything that has to do with social media. 

 

Xenia

Yeah, connect with me on LinkedIn, give me a note that you’ve heard me in this podcast and I’d be more than happy to connect. We can talk about anything on social media or something else. 

 

Andrei

Super! Xenia, thanks so much again, it was really great to have you on the show! I am super happy that we managed to organise today and for everybody tuning in, thanks for staying until the end. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us directly or to Xenia! I am sure she’ll be happy to answer your questions and help you out if you have difficulties with your social media. 

 

Speak soon! Have an amazing week ahead!